Now that William Kennedy has won everything--the National Book
Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer, the MacArthur "genius" grant, not
to mention the New York State Governor's Arts Award, two movie deals,
and tenure--his first novel, The Ink Truck, has been hauled out
of obscurity and into print. First published in 1969, and set like all
Kennedy's fiction in Albany, the novel concerns the bizarre last days
of a disastrously unsuccessful newspaper strike. As the book opens,
"the Guild" has dwindled to three weirdos and their corruptible
leader, Jarvis. Our hero is weirdo Bailey, a lusty, Joyce-loving
columnist who wears a cossack hat and is married to a former roller
derby queen but really loves the irresistibly pneumatic Guild diehard
and weirdo Irma--a love, or lust, which Bailey shares with the third
weirdo, cape-wearing Rosenthal (who doesn't get to first
base). Bailey's program is to dump the contents of the company ink
truck into the Albany snow, which indirectly invokes the wrath of an
entire Gypsy community, which in turn puts him at the mercy of first a
Zen turncoat, then the big boss's secretary, a mini-skirted creature
whose sexual appetites are so sick they require the services of a
mechanical bull . . .

Let's stop right here. Does this sound familiar? I think all my
weirdo cronies planned to write this novel in the years when Kennedy
did write The Ink Truck. Something must have been in the
air--that taste for defeatism and sexual aids, suicidally buffoonish
gestures, unnaturally idiomatic dialogue, and preposterous plots with
ironic distance providing a shot of realism, in the sense that ketchup
is a vegetable. The self-consciousness was so unexamined that heroes
might think and even speak of themselves in third person. Here goes
Bailey: "'Bailey says goodbye,' he said. 'Bailey stands there and
thinks nostalgic thoughts. And then Bailey tells the spirit of the
good old days: 'Spirit, you haven't got a hair on your ass if you
think nostalgia will get Bailey.'"

Cynthia Ozick speaks of how comforting it is to read the fledgling
efforts of the masters, and it certainly can be instructive. I took a
look at part one (sort of titled, "A BIZARRE BOLLY FOLLOWS INK
CARRIER/WHAT'S A BOLLY? PEOPLE ASK") and knew at once which of two
drafts of my own persistently fledgling work-in-progress to discard:
the sillier one. Dignity isn't always an advantage in art or anything,
but in The Ink Truck we see a fellow so smitten with language
he risks tickling it to death. By Legs, Kennedy has already
invented (along with a real-life subject, '20s gangster Jack Diamond)
a prose that can quit joking for a minute. By Billy Phelan's
Greatest Game, he's found a sweet, roIling cadence, very mossy and
Irish, which serves the amiable melancholy, the courtly compassion and
meditative bravado into which Kennedy's original defeated heroic
buffoonery has transmogrified.

Simplification--the pruning of convolutions, the shedding of
ironies--is a sensible way to mature; so is the discovery of subject
and values. I was more startled by what didn't change, or changed
least, in spirit anyhow, from The Ink Truck to the later,
realized work: an aspect inauspiciously heralded in the jacket blurb
as "ever wilder and more surreal misadventures." "Surreal" is so often
a misnomer for plain old preposterousness. And indeed the book's
climax is an unlikely orgy in which it isn't crystal clear whether one
woman really dies or the typewriter just lost its head, because the
tone song-and-dances the whole scene with quips and repartee (Irma:
"Should we strip?" Bailey: "When in Rome," etc.) But there are also
harbingers of stronger stuff--the offhand Irish-American magic realism
that will figure increasingly in Kennedy's work until, by
Ironweed, the book of bums, a quarter of the characters are
ghosts. Plop in the middle of The Ink Truck, Bailey steps for
20 pages out of the library stacks into a time 300 years back when
Albany was Dutch and dying of cholera. I found in this fantasy (and
also in various hallucinations following) a purity, a grace of
invention, lacking everywhere else in this book.

Anyone who got 13 rejection letters for Ironweed deserves to
get his laundry list printed like Nietzsche, and if Kennedy's going to
be studied, as he should, his early stuff should be available. But
The Ink Truck reads best combined with hindsight, which
provides a delicious surprise ending: the lovely Albany trilogy, with
its bittersweet evidence that, as it's often rumored, in the writing
of novels, time is everything.